Allen Harville, co-chair of the Health and Safety Committee of Local 8888, says he is concerned about the presence of beryllium in coal slag, which is heavily used at Newport News Shipbuilding.

Allen Harville, co-chair of the Health and Safety Committee of Local 8888, says he is concerned about the presence of beryllium in coal slag, which is heavily used at Newport News Shipbuilding.

Michael Welles Shapiro, mwshapiro@dailypress.comDaily Press

WASHINGTON — The federal agency responsible for workplace safety on Friday contemplated tighter regulation of the toxic metal beryllium, which exists in small amounts in coal slag, a product used as a blast abrasive to prepare the hulls and tanks of ships for coats of paint.

The product is also used in blasting operations on more traditional construction sites, and officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration briefed a special OSHA advisory committee representing construction industry representatives on a rule that could drop the limit for how much beryllium workers can be exposed to.

As recently as May an OSHA official had suggested that one option would be for the agency to further regulate beryllium for most workers while exempting construction and shipyard workers. That proposal wasn't mentioned Friday.

Coal slag is a glassy byproduct of coal-fired power plants that for decades has been recycled and used for blasting operations at shipyards across the country, including Newport News Shipbuilding. It contains trace amounts of beryllium, which until last year was not listed on hazardous ingredient lists that manufacturers provide with their products.

Newport News Shipbuilding did not notify its employees when beryllium was added to the coal slag hazardous ingredients list. Workers and union officials said they knew nothing about its presence until it was pointed out by the Daily Press.

When blasted against the side of a ship or other surface, coal slag creates big clouds — blasters in shipbuilding and construction typically wear air-fed respirators and other protective equipment to avoid inhaling the dust.

Despite those measures, the OSHA officials said they were concerned that workers could be getting exposed to the metal, which an agency PowerPoint presentation said can cause lung cancer and a lung ailment called chronic beryllium disease.

"We believe that the main operation in construction where beryllium is an issue for workers is abrasive blasting," said Tiffany DeFoe, an OSHA health scientist in the agency's office of chemical hazards.

Though it can take years for exposed workers to show symptoms of chronic beryllium disease, DeFoe said they can quickly get the metal in their system, making them susceptible.

"Sensitization can happen very quickly, often within a person's first month of employment," she said.

She said workers not directly involved in blasting could still be at risk, though she said more study of such workers' health is necessary to draw firmer conclusions.

Specifically, she referred to blast "helpers or people in the vicinity who might not be wearing protective equipment."

On May 24, a different OSHA scientist spoke to the same construction industry advisory committee about the agency's options for lowering the exposure limit for beryllium, which now stands at 2 micrograms per cubic meter.

That scientist, David Valiante, said OSHA could take a number of approaches ranging from mandating better ventilation to cutting the exposure limit tenfold to 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter.

But at that time, Valiante threw out another path the agency could: "a limited scope option, which would exempt construction and maritime" industries.

The notion of carving out a looser limit for construction sites and shipyard facilities did not come up Friday.

It's not clear if a separate OSHA advisory committee for the maritime community will weigh in on the beryllium rule, which the agency has been working on for about 12 years. The Maritime Advisory Committee for Occupational Safety and Health hasn't met in 2013 and met only once in 2012, in February.

Keith Wrightson, a public safety and worker health expert with Public Citizen, told the construction committee his organization favors a 0.2 microgram per cubic meter standard, a level that's also been backed by the United Steelworkers, which has the largest union local at Newport News Shipbuilding.

That 0.2 microgram limit also has support from the biggest beryllium manufacturer in the country, Materion Brush, an Ohio-based company that makes beryllium components for a number of companies including in the energy and aerospace industries.

Manufacturers of coal slag, however, say their product is not dangerous if workers take proper safety precautions. A leading manufacturer, Harsco Corp., has argued that the slag's glassy composition seals in impurities like beryllium.

The manufacturers say alternative blast abrasives carry their own health risks and they've been skeptical of OSHA claims that beryllium in coal slag can lead to ailments.

Stephen A. Stanislawczyk, Harsco's environmental manager, noted in a March 2012 letter to OSHA that the company "has successfully and beneficially used coal slag for nearly 80 years, with no known beryllium-related illnesses."

Contractors and employees at Newport News Shipbuilding use coal slag to blast new and refurbished aircraft carriers. Company executives have said their blasting operations are safe, thanks to tenting to contain blast dust, the use of respirators by blast workers, air testing for beryllium and optional blood tests for workers.

Several epidemiologists, however, have argued that scientists need to perform a broad test of shipyard workers for beryllium sensitization.

While certain industries have known about beryllium exposures for decades, the information is recent in shipbuilding. For years coal slag manufacturers said the amount of beryllium in their product was so small that they did not need to alert customers to its presence.

That changed in February 2012, when OSHA notified coal slag suppliers that their hazard ingredient lists associated "may not be in compliance" because of omissions of "hazardous ingredients, such as beryllium, arsenic, and others."

Bill Tankersley, an industrial hygienist at Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee, said this week that air testing, which is used to determine whether a substance is above or below an exposure limit, is good but not enough for monitoring beryllium, which can be toxic in small doses.

Air samples, he said, "typically don't show anything, particularly when it's something in a concentration so low" like beryllium in coal slag.

Blood tests, he said, would more definitively show whether workers in shipyards and on construction sites are getting sick as a result of blasting with coal slag.

The Navy and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, in letters to OSHA obtained by the Daily Press, have balked at the cost and the size of such a study.

"If companies are working with that material they shouldn't hide from it — they need to have a background blood test of all of them," Tankersley said. "If you have a group of a population who have the potential (for exposure), all of those people ought to have an initial test."

Oak Ridge Associated Universities is one of three labs that performs what's called a beryllium lymphocyte proliferation test.